At all times freaky and far-out, Michelangelo Antonioni’s fascinating and under-appreciated 1970 film Zabriskie Point is now on re-release. Mocked and critically patronised at the time, this was a counterculture adventure with something in common with Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde. It was a midwife to the desert reveries of David Lynch, and provided an acid flashback to Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Short of travelling by time machine, watching this film is the best way to visit the Los Angeles of the late 1960s, with all the streetscapes, billboards and brand names. Zabriskie Point created its own docu-surrealism by casting non-professional unknowns and meshing real campus-unrest footage with experimental waywardness. It is superior, in my heretical view, to his 1966 film Blowup. Mark Frechette plays an armed student radical on the run from police. Stealing a small plane, he lights out for the stark beauty of Death Valley, where he meets Daria (Daria Halprin), a hippie chick with whom he has a sexual epiphany, psychodramatised as an orgy. Daria is having an affair with Lee (Rod Taylor), a corporate real-estate exec, whose company, Daria belatedly grasps, is despoiling the desert with its bourgeois developments. What follows is not a bonfire but a slo-mo detonation of the vanities. Antonioni’s head trip of a film is very pleasurable.